


a brief respite

by V_fics



Series: V's Best Enemies fics [3]
Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Cross-Regeneration Relationship (Doctor Who), Fobwatched Doctor (Doctor Who), Gen, Not Beta Read, Other, ThoscheiLockdown2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:42:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23321875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/V_fics/pseuds/V_fics
Summary: Prompt:Delgado meets fobwatched!13 and is Extremely Delighted (bonus points if fobwatched!13 is his temporary companion and participates in foiling 3 at least once)If he’d been asked, the Master would resolutely deny that he was looking for the Doctor. Not everything he did revolved around the other Time Lord, after all, and no matter what a certain scientist would say, he had a life outside of plotting against his best enemy.Meeting the Doctor under a Chameleon Arch was simply a coincidence.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Delgado)
Series: V's Best Enemies fics [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1998526
Comments: 16
Kudos: 121
Collections: Thoschei Lockdown The First 2020





	a brief respite

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mysticaltorque](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysticaltorque/gifts).



> I DIDN'T GET THE BONUS BUT I GOT FUCKIN FEELINGS sorry i can't write comedy!!!! fuck

He’d landed in the early quarter of the 21st century by happenstance, tracking down the life signs of a nocturnal, carnivorous Etroxian from a planet three galaxies away from Earth. He’d heard rumours that a rogue Time Agent, hoping to sell its teeth and claws on the black market, had accidentally set it loose during transport. The agent had fled, and the creature was now roaming the streets of London, eating up some poor unsuspecting humans in the dead of night.

The Master didn’t have the Rani’s taste for preserving lifeforms, but one shouldn’t look a gift Etroxian in the mouth. If he could simply transport it back forty or fifty decades, the Doctor would have a field day trying to wrangle it back to UNIT. It might even eat up a few soldiers.

The issue came when he crawled out of his TARDIS — it appeared that at some point in the past half century, humanity had gotten rid of those phone booths on the streets, and the time capsule took the form of a newspaper dispenser instead —, having landed a week before the estimated arrival of the Etroxian. He’d just straightened out his ruffled suit when he spotted a blue box, sitting idle across the street.

None of the humans took notice of it, but no self-respecting Time Lord would be fooled by a perception filter. He crossed the street towards it, ignoring the indignant honking of the drivers.

It wasn’t _his_ Doctor’s TARDIS, but it was _the_ Doctor’s. The exterior had changed, even if all the features were the same. He placed a hand on the door and smiled when the ship muttered at him not to touch anything, before letting him step inside.

“I see his taste doesn’t improve with age,” he said, frowning at the interior. Gone were the bright and clean minimalist features, instead everything was gloomy and dark and he’d even implemented mood lighting.

The Doctor’s TARDIS beeped at him.

“Oh, _she_ ,” the Master’s smile brightened, stepping up onto the console. “Wonderful, what does she look like?”

The ship projected an image onto the hexagonal walls.

“Blonde again?” The Master felt a swell of nostalgia within him. “I haven’t seen her hair that long since the early days of the Academy.”

The TARDIS grumbled with something the Master identified as jealousy for not being around before the Doctor became a renegade. The Master’s grin grew ever bigger.

Then, he rounded the other side of the console, and caught sight of a metal apparatus, shaped to fit a humanoid head, wired into the controls. The grin vanished instantly and his hearts skipped a beat.

“No,” he said, picking it up. “Why would she do that?”

The TARDIS gave the mental equivalent of a shrug. and beneath that, left a sad series of beeps. She hadn’t been told either.

“Does she have someone watching her? One of her human acquaintances or—” He frowned at the ship’s answer. “Is she expecting to die here? Waste an entire life as a human?”

The Master presumed his future self would understand the Doctor’s logic better. The Doctor had always been unorthodox, even for a renegade, but he’d never expect her to willingly turn herself human without any backup.

He frowned and set the Chameleon Arch back down.

“Do you know where she’s living?”

The TARDIS screen lit up with a bright chirp. He eyed the coordinates and the ship gave a teasing nudge at his mind.

“That isn’t true at all,” he said tersely, “I’m simply doing my future self a favour. And I won’t interfere, I have other matters to attend to regarding the Doctor I currently know.”

The TARDIS was unconvinced. The Master resisted the urge to huff and straightened his suit cuffs instead.

“Never mind that. I don’t believe this future Doctor will mind if I borrow a few tools. I misplaced a few of mine during my last escape.”

The TARDIS wheezed between a laugh and a sigh. The Master ignored her.

The TARDIS projections had gotten her features right, but the static hologram had no way of capturing the future Doctor’s personality. She was young and looked rather lively, although that was possibly due to her work. She’d set her human self up with a job at a travel agency in the middle of a mall, all bright with a cheerful smile and patience that could only exist in the service industry. The Master had no idea what the real Doctor was like at this point in the future, but he imagined she wouldn’t be anywhere near as polite with the abrasive and pretentious humans as she was pretending to be right now.

Had she been under threat? She must have been. Why else would any Time Lord subject themself to such a demeaning experience as pretending to be human? Perhaps he should find out what had incited this change, resolve it, and bring the Doctor back. That must be why his future self hadn’t intervened, knowing that he’d already been involved.

Crossing time streams left him with a bad taste in his mouth, but there was no other option. Future or not, the Doctor was _his_ nemesis, and he couldn’t have her taken out of the role due to any threat but his own.

He’d spent about a week trying to trace the Doctor’s last movements according to the TARDIS logs. She’d made some stops around Earth a few months prior, to an assortment of places in somewhere called Sheffield, and prior to that, an asteroid prison and a future human colony planet. There hadn’t been any obvious threats, besides the records showing a Judoon squad had broken through the shields, but the TARDIS insisted it had all been taken care of and had no bearing on the Doctor’s current status as a stupidly complacent human.

And so, with little else to go on, he sat himself at one of the tables of a café situated across from the travel agency, and watched the silly human Doctor go about her petty human day explaining travel insurance and membership packages to other humans whose thoughts of incredible journeys were simply flying to another part of the same dull rock.

If he could get his hands on whatever contained the Doctor’s memories, it would offer some insight into what the Doctor was hiding from. Unfortunately, it would also give him a peek into his future and her past, and he reckoned the Doctor would be quite cross at that.

However, he had no idea what receptacle the Chameleon Arch had fed all her memories into. The traditional option, if a bit too symbolic, would be a fob watch, but those had fallen far out of fashion by this era, and the Doctor’s human self didn’t look like one for vintage collecting. It wouldn’t be on her person, more likely to be stored away somewhere in her residence.

Or he could simply hypnotise her into finding it, then wipe her memory before she realised who’d set her up to it, but that felt rather like cheating, and it was never _fun_ if the Doctor couldn’t cheat back—

“Can I help you?”

The Master would deny being caught off guard. He didn’t even spill his tea, as the Doctor’s human self dragged a squealing chair over and sat down across the table from him, annoyance and fury behind her service words. Her eyes flashed and the eye contact gave him the chance to catch up with her. He’d been staring too long, and she’d noticed his repeated presence, and was beginning to assume the worst.

“My apologies,” he said, giving her a polite smile. “I’m here on business and had some time to spare, I didn’t mean to bother you.”

Hazel eyes furrowed. He’d never seen the Doctor with such a colour before, and the TARDIS had refused to show him any of the Doctor’s incarnations between the one he knew and the one sitting before him. It was thrilling to see that even as a human, the Doctor was sharp-eyed and cautious, but she was still _human_ , and the imbalance was ever so boring.

Not to mention, that she didn’t recognise him at all.

“What are you here on business for?” she asked, hackles still raised. Her shoulders were tense, her eyes fixed on his face, and her lips were pressed firmly together.

“A colleague of mine got into some trouble,” he said vaguely. It was the early twenty-first century, did people still travel for things like that? “I’m just helping out.”

“Corporate stuff,” the Doctor frowned, unimpressed. She straightened and leaned back into her chair. “Well, good luck with that, sir, and might I suggest you find a different spot to sit?”

The Master let his bemusement show on his face in a puzzled smile. The Doctor returned a cheerfully fake one, pushed her chair out, and stalked off back to the agency storefront. He raised his eyebrows to himself, stood, and moved his chair around so his back was facing the shop.

Perhaps he should leave the future to sort itself out.

He was leaving, he swore he was, but the week had elapsed and it was time for the Etroxian to appear, in the dead of night, tumbling onto the streets and searching for food. So the Master snuck out, all the appropriate tools needed to transport the creature several decades into the past, for the Doctor of his time to deal with. It would be funny, he imagined, for it was always charming to see the Doctor interacting with alien animals. He’d get starry-eyed in a different way to the Rani and had a tendency to ramble off in chatter with something trying to bite his head off.

Then again, that was something he liked about them. The Doctor would be awfully boring if they responded to the Master’s murder attempts with anything but a nice talk.

The universe must have been plotting against him, however, for while the Etroxian landed right where the Master had calculated, inside a one-way containment field covered with a perception filter to make all the humans detour around it, he’d forgotten there was one person in particular whose biology might have circumvented those measures.

To her credit, even as a human the Doctor didn’t seem to be one for screaming in fear. She’d taken an umbrella and was whacking the ten-foot tall creature with it. It would be a hilarious sight if it weren’t for the fact that the Doctor was very, _very_ human and could die before the Master could return her memories and biological imprint to trigger a regeneration.

The Master pointed the opening of the contaiment capsule at the Etroxian, aimed, and— _swoosh!_ The creature glowed white, shrunk down, zipped into the cubed box in his hands. The Doctor collapsed onto the ground and heaved for breath.

“What in the stars are you doing here at this hour?” he asked, pocketing the box and most definitively not rushing over to her in anything but a slow, meandering stride. He offered his hand, but she simply stared at him in shock. Fighter or not, the Doctor was rubbish as a human.

“What the fuck are _you_ doing here?!” the Doctor yelled back, scrambling to her feet. Her face was deathly pale in the streetlights. “What the hell was that thing? What did you do to it? Did you kill it? Who the fuck _are_ you?”

Ah, the Doctor didn’t mind swearing either as a human. That was rather endearing.

“It’s called an Etroxian,” he said calmly, pulling out a device from his pocket and deactivating the protective barrier and perception filter. The Doctor planted her hands on her knees and trembled for air. “It’s from the Neonavaen star system. Its teeth and claws are some of the toughest material in its home galaxy. Someone was transporting it through spacetime, but it got loose and landed here. I was hoping to capture it before it hurt anyone.”

“Shut up, Kirk,” the Doctor wheezed and straightened, disbelief in her stunned eyes. “Tell me what’s really going on. Some sort of, fucked up lab experiment? Did we ressurrect the dinosaurs?”

Oh, snarky. The Doctor was snarky now. He felt a little envious of his future self.

“It’s an alien from far away from here,” he reiterated. “And I just saved you from getting eaten by it.”

“Okay,” the Doctor said. “Thanks. I guess.”

She picked up her umbrella. The Etroxian had bitten a hole through the fabric, so she started off and tossed it into a dumpster, then made her way for the street without even a goodbye.

“Would you like me to walk you home?” he asked without thinking.

The Doctor swivelled on her heel and stared at him.

“I don’t even know your name,” she said.

“You can call me Koschei. Oakdown,” he added, remembering that humans had family names.

The Doctor folded her arms. She was still in a state of shock, using her disdain to seek control of the situation. He could relate to that.

“One of your parents Russian?” she commented idly, but gestured for him to join her and started down the road.

“Coincidence,” he responded.

They walked in silence, and he took the moment to survey her. She was taking things rather well, for a human.

“Are you an alien?” she asked suddenly.

He smiled. The Doctor might have been human, a perhaps slower on the uptake than usual, but for a human, she was still sharp enough.

“Yes, I am.”

“Are you going to kill me too, then?”

“Not everything is about you humans,” he said, dismissively. “The Etroxian simply wanted to eat you because of the calcium in your bones. You musn’t assume any alien will try to kill you. That’s xenophobia.”

The Doctor gave a snort, then cleared her throat and looked away.

“I figured. You look like an alien,” she said. “Weird fashion sense, weird sentences, and your accent _sounds_ local but it’s kinda off, but not the way most people sound when they fake an accent, and the goatee—and you keep looking at me like I’m stupid.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, but he wasn’t sure if he meant it. His goatee was just fine, thank you.

“You look really human for an alien, though,” she said. “What’s with that?”

So, even as a human the Doctor enjoyed talking and asking questions. The Master almost felt relieved by it.

“You look very Gallifreyan for a human,” he returned.

“Gallifreyan,” she pronounced the word slowly and came to a stop, turning to him. “That’s what you are?”

“Yes,” he said, stopping with her. He glanced down at an apartment building. “We’re also known as Time Lords.”

“How modest,” she said, unimpressed. She looked down at the front door to the lobby and turned back to the Master. She was thinking hard, then gave a sigh and met his eyes. “I’m going to stress-cook now. Do you want to come in?”

He couldn’t imagine any sort of universe where the Doctor was a good cook, but he would be lying if he wasn’t curious to see if that’d changed over the incarnations.

“I don’t even know your name,” he answered.

The Doctor covered her laugh with her hand and shook her head, turning away. She brushed her hair from her face and spun back.

“Beth,” she said at last. “You can call me Beth.”

Beth, what an ordinary human name for someone who was only temporarily human and anything but ordinary.

“Well then, Beth. It would be my pleasure.”

Beth’s nose wrinkled and she sighed, but gave him a real smile.

“You’re definitely alien, Koschei,” she said. “But I don’t think I mind it.”

And she, the Master thought, as Beth lead him through the doors of the apartment building, was very much so human. He wasn’t sure if he minded it either.

Beth’s apartment was small but clean and orderly, yet another distinction from the Doctor. There were very few personal items, no photographs or anything indicative of a true past. After Beth hung up their coats and made for the kitchen, he did a quick check of her pockets, but there was nothing that could be holding her memories. He made a note to break in while she was at work.

Either the Doctor had learned to cook over the indeterminate amount of time between the incarnation the Master knew and the current regeneration, or they were simply extremely competent as a human. Food wasn’t necessary for Time Lords, but it was a novel experience when it did happen.

“You’re very skilled at this,” he said, watching as she cut some vegetables with an experienced ease. He figured the Doctor would have lopped a finger off at that speed.

“I’d hope so,” Beth answered over the bubbling water. “I’ve only been learning for twenty years.”

“I have a friend who’s been trying for four hundred years and can’t manage even basic meals.”

“Four hundred years? Is that how old you are?” She paused to peer at his face, brows furrowing. “I’d expect wrinkles and bone.”

“Gallifreyans age differently to humans,” he said simply. “For us, death by old age is a slow one.”

“But what do you _do_?” Beth asked, her eyes on the stove. “You don’t spend all that time working, right?”

Human societies, the Master thought. Then again, Gallifrey had been equally dull.

“Some wish to accomplish goals and change the universe, others seek to discover, and some run away.”

“And you?”

“I have goals,” he said vaguely, “I know what I desire from this universe.”

Beth hummed and accepted his word for it, which was the biggest difference between her and the Doctor. She didn’t know him, and only doubted him when her human conscious found him suspecious. She had no idea who he was to her, or vice versa.

“Wish I knew how that felt,” she said, and her words were nearly lost to the bubbling of the soup.

He couldn’t tell if that was a trait of the future Doctor or the human persona, but she wasn’t going to tell him her falsified life story. He glanced across her mind and recognised that she wasn’t one to tell a stranger all about herself. If he pried further, he could figure it out without her noticing.

That still felt like cheating.

“Would you like to find out?”

Beth turned and stared at him, human confusion all over her face.

“Find out what?” she asked.

“Find out what you want from your existence,” he prompted. “You could be much more than this.”

Beth continued to stare.

“It wouldn’t be permanent, of course,” he said, refusing to give any sort of self-consciousness acknowledgement. “I have commitments that cannot involve you. However, it was my plan to take a vacation of sorts for the moment.”

“I don’t know what your job is like, picking up lost alien creatures,” Beth said slowly, “but I can’t just drop mine to go travel the universe with you.”

“My species designation is Time Lord for a reason,” the Master reminded. “We invented time travel billions of years ago.”

“Aren’t there rules about that?” Beth asked, idly stirring the pot, but her eyes were fixed on him with a sort of cautious wonder the Master found painfully familiar. “Like a non-interference clause? Isn’t taking me breaking that?”

“It is,” the Master smiled, “and it’s broken more frequently than you’d think.”

“By men like you?”

“The gendered naming of Time Lords is a fault of other languages,” the Master replied. “You’ll find very few of us actually strictly identify as such.”

“So you’re an alien, time travelling, not-always-a-man in a suit,” Beth summarised. “I can see why you think I’d say yes.”

The Master blinked, but schooled his figures and tamped down on his disappointment. That was incredibly Doctor-like of her.

“Is that a refusal, then?”

“Look, Koschei,” Beth said, oblivious to how the Master’s hearts hammered at the name. “I’ll believe that there is life beyond this planet, because it almost ate me, but time travel?”

Oh, humans, always so fearful of the impossible. Or was it fear? Beth was incredulous, but her mind radiated _worry_ , telling herself she wasn’t a child and had to draw a line somewhere. He was struck with a feeling of disconnect, staring at the person he knew deep in his hearts was the Doctor, his oldest friend, but human and jaded and who didn’t know him at all.

He glanced at the clock. It was one-thirty in the morning.

“Wait here,” the Master said curtly, sweeping out of the kitchen without a look back.

“What?” Beth said, watching as Koschei darted out of view. The door opened and shut and she blinked, baffled. He hadn’t even taken his weird coat with him. She stared back at the soup. It was almost done. What was he doing? What was _she_ doing?

She set the spatula down and turned off the stove, turning away to lean against the counter. What an odd night. Koschei still gave her a bit of a weird vibe, but it wasn’t all danger and red flags. There was something about him, even before the Exter-whatever alien had shown up, that kept prying for her attention. He looked at her like she was missing out on some inside joke, but there was also a sort of sadness in those dark eyes.

Beth brushed her hair out of her eyes and blinked. She could see the living room through the kitchen door, and the air was shimmering in the space. A closet materialised, fading in and out onto the rug, until it solidified silently and the door opened.

Koschei stepped out.

Beth’s jaw dropped. She covered her mouth with her hands and stared, not daring to move. Was she hallucinating now? Did the stress of the night finally drive her mad?

“It’s called a TARDIS,” Koschei said, holding the door open so she could see there was something inside that was definitely not a closet. “Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. It’s the primary vehicle of the—”

“God,” she choked out and interrupted him. She took a step forwards. “God, why doesn’t it make a noise?”

“It—It’s not supposed to,” Koschei said. Beth was too stunned to see the flicker of sadness in his eyes. “It’s supposed to camouflage itself and travel silently. Making a noise would defeat that purpose.”

“It should make a noise,” she repeated. She didn’t know why, it just felt strange that it didn’t.

Beth took a step inside. Everything was a dark grey, stylishly black and it gave her the impression of one of those exceedingly minimalist monochrome room designs found in the more modern flats. There were cleanly cut doors that lead elsewhere, and in the centre, a strange hexagonal control console.

She stepped back outside and ran her hands around the closet exterior.

“Does it always look like a closet?” she asked.

“No, it’s the Chameleon Circuit, it changes its appearance to blend in with the surroundings.”

“I see.”

“And the different dimensions are the product of spatiotemporal engineering—”

“Mate, you and I both know I have no idea what any of that means. I get it, you’re a super smart time travelling alien being.” And yet, she couldn’t help but smile, and met his eyes. “And you want me to travel with you?”

“Temporarily,” Koschei said. “A month. Maybe an Earth year at most.”

“Why?”

Koschei pressed his lips together and she knew he was trying to think of an acceptable answer.

“Because I’d like to,” he said simply. At least he was honest.

“Do you normally ask humans to travel with you?”

“No.”

“Does your kind usually ask other species to travel with you?”

“There are some exceptions, but it’s… exceedingly rare.”

Beth let out a breath and stared into the interior of the TARDIS. The wood seemed to hum under her fingers.

“You know, anyone else would say yes. I want to say yes, too,” she said, taking a step back and pulling her hands away. “I mean, all of time and space, and everything, getting to leave Earth—who would say no to that? But I… I mean why would you do that? For someone you don’t even know? There’s gotta be something you gain from this. No one with that much power does anything out of their own good will.”

Koschei stared at her, pensive and thinking and there was that sadness in his eyes again. His face really didn’t move a lot, but there was this feeling, that hint, that she could figure out what he was hiding.

“You remind me of a friend,” he said at last, and all the air left her lungs in a sigh. “A friend whom I lost.”

She nodded, and closed her eyes. “I know that feeling. But you do know I’m not gonna replace them, right?” Beth opened her eyes and met his. “I am my own person.”

“I’m aware,” Koschei answered. “You will not be replacing him.”

Beth surveyed his face. Did she believe him? She found it hard to believe people these days. Koschei had been unsettling from the start. Yet, at the same time—she didn’t have much else to lose, did she?

“Well come on then,” she said, turning away from the TARDIS. “Time machine or not, you said you’d help me finish this soup, and you need to tell me what to pack for a trip around the universe.”

She could feel Koschei’s eyes on her as she re-entered the kitchen and started pulling out cutlery and bowls. She heard the TARDIS door close and felt a jump in her singular heart, but when she turned back around, Koschei was still there with her, taking the silverware from her hands with a weathered fondness behind that outdated goatee.

No, the Master thought, as they settled down for the most mundane meal they’d ever had since the Doctor had left Gallifrey, this future Doctor’s human self couldn’t replace the one he knew, nor would such a human allow any of his usual schemes.

But he would gladly accept those limitations, for the gift of being able to travel with a friend.


End file.
